GURL Friday and the World Wide Web

What is this Web business, anyhow?

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a special part of the Internet. Most of the information being trucked around on the Net is sent and received in the form of ASCII text files, which just means that they are computer files that have letters and numbers and punctuation without any kind of formatting. No fonts or letter sizes or page sizes are defined for these files. They're just strictly text. This makes transfer of these files over a modem fast, since they are lean and mean, but it means that the files will look clunky when viewed on screen.

Web sites are ASCII text files, too. A few years ago, some folks thought of a nifty idea to make the Internet a little more useful. This nifty idea was HTML. HTML(Hypertext Markup Language), the basis of the Web, was originally developed as a way for scientists to electronically publish their findings on the Internet. HTML provided an universal means for folks to post information that incorporated some basic page formatting elements into the posted files and provided electronic indexing and refererence functions. The WWW is actually just all the files on the Internet that have HTML coding added to them. That's it. Simple, huh?

The Internet computer file that held a table of contents for the published work, or perhaps a list of files available on that computer, became known as a "Home Page." It provided a way for readers to jump quickly to points of interest without scrolling through all of the file. Sounds just like a printed book, with an index and page numbers, doesn't it? Well, that's exactly what a Web site is.

It's an electronic book, with a Home Page as a table of contents, and individual computer files as pages, and a really nifty page turning function, in the form of URL links, all built in. The URL (Universal Resource Locator) is an address. It's a bit of code that allows HTML-savvy Web browsing software to send a call out over the Internet and get back the file referred to by the URL code.

So now we need "Bookmarks."

Hence the nomenclature of Bookmarks. Just as you can put a slip of paper, or a Post-it Note (TM), or a half-eaten tuna sandwich, in a book to mark a place to return to, Netscape will "bookmark" a Web page! Each Netscape Bookmark represents a URL. Netscape Bookmarks keep track of a page Title, which is always (at least, its supposed to be) incorporated into the HTML file you are reading. The URL that leads to that page is also stored as part of the Netscape Bookmark. A Comment about the bookmarked Page can be added, if you wish. Netscape has some rudimentary organizing features available to manage Bookmarks.

Of course the Web isn't a library of printed books. It contains computer files that may be text "pages", but it also contains files that may be movies, sounds, or many other things. Any of these things on the Web must be a computer file, and have a URL assigned to it. But the Web is like a library, in that it contains a vast amount of information, most of which is organized, at least locally, like a book.

Which is all very well, but now that you've liberally sprinkled that vast, chaotic Web library with bookmarks, your problem is finding the bookmark that will get you to pages that discuss, let's say, tuna sandwiches.But a bookmark isn't much good without the book you put it in! You're pretty sure that you put bookmarks in at least three Web "books" that had information on tuna sandwiches. One of them was an online cookbook, and one of them was a biography of the Duke of Sandwich (apocryphal inventor of the sandwich) but where the books are in that World Wide Chaos is another matter! And what WAS that third site, anyhow?

GURL Friday tracks URLs in a unique way.

That's why you need GURL Friday. GURL Friday is at heart a pwerful database that allows you to sort your bookmarks, categorize your bookmarks, date your bookmarks, to look up bookmarks according to any of these and many more criteria.

IN GURL Friday, each bookmark is a record, which just means a separate entry in your GURL Friday database. And that URL entry can be categorized in a myriad of ways, many of which you can customize very easily.

So GURL Friday is like a an electronic library catalog that you build for your own personal Web library.

GURL Friday Surfs!

So you see that with GURL Friday, you can easily find the bookmarks you saved for the tuna sandwich project. But even the most well organized and instantly searchable catalog is pretty irrelevant without a way to get at the resources it catalogs.

Well, GURL Friday can open Netscape and take you to the GF-URL you've selected, all with the single click of a button.

And there you'll be, right at the tuna sandwich information you so desparately needed!

How GURL Friday is different from other products like Grab Net, Smart Bookmarks, and ClayBasket.

Many other bookmarks utilities are essentially just fancy list managers that allow easy classification and validation of bookmarks. They allow fancy drag 'n' drop rearranging of bookmarks, screen capturing, and automated verification of links. The uniqueness of GURL Friday lies in the ease-of-use and flexiblility of FileMaker Pro.

In GURL Friday, you choose the organization of your GF-URLs at any moment you wish to. With FileMaker Pro's finding and sorting capabilities, this organization can be changed at will.

Most bookmark utilities tout their usefullness as research and organizational tools, but with GURL Friday you can define your own fields and design your own layouts with custom graphics and fonts for virtually any kind of web based information gathering.

But wait, there's more!

With the click of a button, you can add all of your current Netscape Bookmarks to your GURL Friday database, without disturbing your Netscape information at all. Of course, after you put your Netscape Bookmarks in GURL Friday, you'll never need to work with Netscape Bookmarks again!
GURL Friday will, with consummate ease, create a personalized HTML Hotlist page for you to distribute to friends, colleagues, or your own files.
These Hotlists can contain any number of GF-URLs from any combination of categories you choose. Or pick GF-URLs individually, and tailor your Hotlist in any way you like!
Customized copies of your original GURL Friday database can contain subsets of your original GURL Friday database. This way, you can have a GURL Friday that contains any certain type of GF-URL you choose. The copy function can even exclude your private comments and passwords. These customized copies of GURL Friday can make surfing, sorting and finding GF-URLs even easier and faster.
GURL Friday is named for her ability to grab URLs from an open Web page. With the click of a button, GURL Friday will create a record and add the currently open URL to it, along with its page title! You may then categorize and comment on this new GF-URL any way you like.


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